Toxic Vancouver Oil Spill – 2700 Litres into English Bay

Oil found on Second Beach in Vancouver by Dr. Peter Ross from Vancouver Aquarium. (Vancouver Aquarium)

If you’ll remember, the last time I wrote in this blog, it was about Dogwood Initiative’s #notanker virtual reality campaign. Well guess what? No need for virtual reality glasses because it actually happened. C’mon, people. Why do we suck at making changes for the better? This is the update as of today.

The Canadian Coast Guard said the 2,700-litre spill of…bunker fuel is 80 percent contained. However, beaches in Vancouver are showing signs of contamination, and the slick has reached West Vancouver. (CBC news, April 10, 2015)

Since the last time that I lived here 15 years ago, the number of freighters sitting in English Bay seems to have quadrupled. I’ve always been told that Vancouver is a green city, but it often doesn’t feel like it. My apartment building still doesn’t have organic recycling, so I find myself collecting up my green scraps in a bag in the freezer to dump into a neighbour’s organic bin weekly. Just because it’s pretty here doesn’t mean that it’s green. Not by a longshot.

They say that this oil spill is not catastrophic, but even still, oil is not supposed to spill into the water, not 2700 litres of it. The BC SPCA says that even one drop of oil can kill a bird. This is deeply disturbing considering that it took six long hours to get the booms in place to contain the oil, and 12 hours to notify the City of Vancouver that the spill occured. Someone’s got some ‘splainin’ to do. Gregor Robertson, the city’s mayor, Christy Clark the BC Premier are now asking questions to figure out what happened. Everyone is pointing the finger at one another. Shoreline is Federal, coastline is Federal, so I guess the issue is Federal. How do clusterf*cks happen? Well If the spill happened at 5pm Vancouver time then it was 8pm in Ottawa. It was after dinner, and maybe the Ottawa Feds had already settled into their Netflix binges in complacency.

However, we all know what happened. Nobody really took charge or sounded the alarm. Nobody was talking to anyone, and no one was listening. No one knew how to sound the alarm, or what to do when it happened. When I first heard, I signed up with the city, fully expecting to be called down to the beach yesterday or today. Not a peep though. Hello?? McFly???? Well,if you feel like signing up yourself then you can right here

C’mon Feds, can you please figure this stuff out better? How to respond faster? How to How to organize people? How about keeping our Coast Guards better funded, so that the Coast Guard could’ve done a better job. This is no fire drill Feds. You really have to move faster.